While we are still in the planning stages of A SmokeLong Summer 26 (our fifth year!), we do have quite a few of our ducks in relatively nice rows. There might be a few changes to this schedule, and we’ll be filling in details along the way—but we couldn’t wait one more second to share this with you. Please note that our live online events are generally recorded and edited, then sent to the participants one or two days after the event. We have tried to schedule our live online events so that as many people around the world can attend often, but please be informed that our earth is turning; we can’t stop it. Our write-ins are scheduled at three different times so that we hope everyone in our global flash village can write with us.
Read more about A SmokeLong Summer 26
May/June
May 31st 10am NYC – Opening Event featuring Workshop Prize Finalists
Each year SmokeLong hosts The SmokeLong Workshop Prize, open to previous and current participants of any SmokeLong workshop. You can find out more about this opportunity on our Submittable page. Join us on May 31st as we open A SmokeLong Summer 26 by celebrating the winners and finalists from last year’s competition.
We’ll also mingle, giving everyone a chance to meet the summer workshop participants.
June 6th, 11am NYC Webinar – Better Together: The Art of Collaborative Writing
At its heart, collaborative writing is about community: the trust and generosity that grow when writers let each other into their processes and build something together that they could not have made alone.
In this webinar, we’ll explore the surprising gifts of collaborative writing—from building resilience to expanding your creative toolbox—and reveal the ways you’re already collaborating every time you respond to, borrow from, or are inspired by another artist’s work. We’ll address the real concerns that hold writers back, offer practical guidance on choosing a collaborator and deciding how to work together, and give you the chance to experience firsthand the joy and magic of collaborating.
Michelle Ross is the author of four story collections, the latest of which is Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, a collaboration with Kim Magowan that was released from EastOver Press in 2025. Her books have won the Moon City Short Fiction Award, the Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50, and the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America. It was spotlighted in Best Small Fictions and received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is an Editor at 100 Word Story.
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches at Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short story collection The Last Day (forthcoming in 2026), published by Moon City Press; Don’t Take This the Wrong Way (2025), co-authored with Michelle Ross, published by EastOver Press, and chosen as one of LitHub’s 100 Most Notable Books of 2025; the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel.
June 13th Write-Ins
Come and write with us, no stress, just an hour of scribbling to nutty prompts. We’ll meet three times so that as many people around the world can join in. You’ll also have time to chat with your workshop mates in breakout rooms.
5am NYC
10am NYC
5pm NYC
June 20th 1pm NYC – SmokeLong Fellows Reading and Interviews
Join us for a celebration of our 2026 SmokeLong Emerging Writer Fellows. Our fellows will read their work, and we’ll talk about the fellowship. There will also be time in breakout rooms to chat with your workshop mates.
TBA Panel Roundtable New Zealand in cooperation with Flash Frontier
July
July 5th Noon ET – Open Mic
The sign-up sheet will be in the workshop one week before this event. Usually we have time for 12 readers. This is a great opportunity to test-run your work, but it’s also a good time to chat with and support your workshop mates.
July 10th, 7pm NYC – Author Interview and Reading with Mel Bosworth and Ryan Ridge, the authors of Climate Strange.
“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth have produced the most perfect weird book. Are these dreams? Fantasias? Postcards from a parallel universe? It doesn’t matter, because they’re so absorbing and funny and sad and good they deserve to just exist without category, to be read without anything but delight.” —Amber Sparks author of Happy People Don’t Live Here
Ryan Ridge is the author of New Bad News (Sarabande Books) and the novella American Homes (University of Michigan Press), among other books. His collaborative collection Climate Strange, written with Mel Bosworth, is forthcoming in May 2026 from Astrophil Press. An associate professor at Weber State University, he chairs the Department of English Language and Literature. He lives in Salt Lake City with the writer Ashley Marie Farmer and their greyhound, Doug, and plays bass for the Snarlin’ Yarns, who’ve put out three freak folk albums.
Mel Bosworth is the author of the novel Freight and co-author with Ryan Ridge of the short fiction collections Second Acts in American Lives and Climate Strange. His work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, New World Writing, Santa Monica Review, Melville House, American Book Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Western Massachusetts.
July 11th Write-Ins
Come and write with us, no stress, just an hour of scribbling to nutty prompts. We’ll meet three times so that as many people around the world can join in. You’ll also have a some time in breakout rooms to chat with your workshop mates.
5am ET
10am ET
5pm ET
July 17-19 – UK Flash Fiction Festival (TBA, tentative)
Join us as we take a peek at an event at the UK Flash Fiction Festival, one of flash’s best summer events—always a joy—held at the campus of Trinity College in Bristol, UK.
July 26th Noon – Master Series Author Reading and Interview – Amy Hempel
Amy Hempel is a recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Artists Foundation, and the Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the author of Sing to It, Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage, and is co-editor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, GQ, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Her Collected Stories was named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2007, and won the Ambassador Book Award for best fiction of the year. In 2008 she received the REA Award for the Short Story, and in 2009 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She has a B.A. in Journalism from San Jose State University and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College and at Stony Brook Southampton. She lives near New York City.
August
August 1st 9am NYC – Open Mic
The sign-up sheet for our August open mic will be in the workshop one week before the event. Come read or just support your workshop mates. There will be lots of time to chat with your fellow workshoppers in breakout rooms.
August 2nd 3pm NYC — SmokeLong Book Launch for Beth Sherman’s novella-in-flash How to Get There from Here
Join us as we celebrate the publication of Beth Sherman’s debut novella-in-flash. There will be giveaways!
Beth Sherman is the author of How to Get There from Here, a novella-in-flash published by Ad Hoc Fiction. She has had more than 250 stories featured in literary journals, including Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres and SmokeLong Quarterly, where she’s a Submissions Editor and the winner of SmokeLong’s 2024 Workshop Prize. Her work is included in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026 and Best Small Fictions 2025. Sherman has a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and an MFA from Queens College. The author of five mystery novels, she can be reached on social media @bsherm36.
August 9th Write-Ins
Come and write with us, no stress, just an hour of scribbling to nutty prompts. We’ll meet three times so that as many people around the world can join in. There will also be time to chat with your workshop mates in breakout rooms.
5am NYC
10am NYC
8pm NYC
August 12th evening PT TBA — Flash Fiction Forum San Jose hybrid event
Stay tuned for more information. We’re thrilled to collaborate with Flash Fiction Forum in San Jose!
August 22nd Noon NYC, Flash in the Classroom panel and workshop
In this 90-minute panel discussion, we’ll talk to university and high-school creative writing instructors about how they used flash in their classrooms. Michael Czyzniejewski, Kelly Pedro, and Shareen Murayama will be joining us for this discussion.
August 29th 11am NYC, Farewell and Open Mic
Come read your work or just support your fellow workshop mates for our last event in A SmokeLong Summer 26—but of course SmokeLong Fitness continues.
